You may well have been asleep when it happened, but it probably won't have escaped your attention that we recently had ourselves a little earthquake in this country. I was lucky enough to still be up when it hit and jolly exciting it was too as the power of the Earth rattled my light fittings in a touchingly non-threatening way- a bit like having your hair ruffled by Mother Nature herself. If ever a major geological event could be described as 'quaint', this was it.

The following morning I had a look at the quake coverage on various news websites and what caught my eye most of all were the comments at the bottom of every story from people up and down the nation- and what a joy to behold they were! It seemed that everyone who'd experienced the tremor all across this island of ours was united by a common feeling of what a jolly caper the whole thing had been. Testimony abounded of rattling doors, loosening tiles and confused, barking pets but more than that was the community spirit that seemed to be forged from finding out that someone 200 miles away had felt exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. It felt like having a drink in a chat in a huge pub on a lonely hillside when it's utterly snowbound, no-one has to be up for work in the morning and everyone might as well just sit back and enjoy life together. It felt good to be English that day.

Then the Yanks turned up.

By mid-morning, a steady trickle of posts had come through from all over the southern United States written by people who seemed to be dismayed that we could all get giddy about something as trifling as a little 5.2 tremor. "You Limeys!" went the gist of most of them "we get 6.5's three or four times a year. What are you all getting excited about?". Soon the ante had been upped by the good people of California (the ones who created the world's 5th largest economy then put the bloke from 'Kindergarten Cop' in charge of it) who started prattling on about the big quakes they'd had and how they lived on a fault-line that could plunge them into the Pacific at any moment. They seemed to suggest that they knew what real earthquakes were all about and that we should shut up about our little 10 seconds of shaking and stop being so stupid.

Yes. That's right. They live in a country constantly being shaken by earthquakes and yet, in their eyes, we're the ones who are daft. They had decided to live on what is basically a huge crack in the ground where geology likes to have noisy parties, which is crackers enough when you think about it, but then they seemed to feel this was something to brag about! Then I remembered that America's biggest tourist attraction, Yellowstone Park, is just a big volcano that's due to detonate any minute now and yet this is the sort of place most of them liked to go on holiday to. That is when they're not visiting the Grand Canyon which is basically a great big reminder that Mother Nature doesn't like America very much. Obviously, this is a nation with some self-worth issues.

But it's not just Americans that seem to positively thrive on letting the Earth make life as difficult as possible for themselves. Ever since I started watching Ray Mears' 'Bushcraft' (having read the name of the show in the Radio Times and got the wrong end of the stick completely) I've seen a cavalcade of idiots who've decided to eschew such comforts as central heating and toilets to live like their ancestors in desolate forests and tundra eating bark and washing their hair in pine cones. Not only does Ray, who seems like an intelligent chap at first sight, join in with these people and their desolate existences- he seems to positively wallow in seeking out more and more awful situations in which to plonk himself. In his most recent series he stayed in this country and, despite probably earning enough money off the telly to live in Richard Branson's beard with Jodie Kidd, he still spent his time eating soil in a damp Welsh ditch.

Elderly realtives are, of course, the masters at this sort of thing and like nothing more than banging on about how difficult life has been for them- spending interminable hours at Christmas and weddings banging on to the young of the family about how they used to walk eight miles to school through snow, hail, fire, brimstone and slaying of the first-born. Then when they got there they'd eat slate and get buggered by the Games teacher before trudging all the way home whilst being stalked by the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Nine days a week. Naked.
It really does make you despair for humanity when we've climbed to the top of the evolutionary ladder and colonised the planet for our own selfish benefit and then decided to spend our entire time bragging about living on tectonic raves and watching a man on the goggle-box eat badger droppings while Granny tells us about trooping through hell to a cross between a school and Dachau.

We don't deserve to be where we are. If there'a God, he might as well wipe our ungrateful hides off the face of the Earth with a flood, a meteor shower, a plague; anything really that would stop this planet being populated by a dominant species which seems it rather hadn't bothered evolving at all. Mind you, if that did happen the apocalyptic extinction event had better be quick and thorough. Cause if it was slow, and if anyone slipped through the net, we'd never hear the end of it...

Just under three weeks from now, give or take an hour, there's a good chance I'll be outdoors, naked and unconscious. I'll be in Tunisia on holiday and, since the daytime temperature will have nudged above 20 degrees and the sun will have spent it's day lazily traversing the sky and burning down on my Viking skin, I'll most probably have sunburn. I won't, however, have the all-over, salmon-pink flesh, flakes of skin all-over the bedroom floor, Skinless-Julia-from-Hellraiser-III form of sunburn- I'm told old and experienced with the factor 50 for that to happen.

No, I'll have protected myself throughly by covering whatever flesh I've exposed (which won't be much- I only recently purchased my first ever pair of non-swimming shorts) when sat by the pool listening to Rodrigo y Gabriella with a Simon Schama and some bizarre North African cocktail. I will be covered in so much sunblock that I'll look like as white as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man man getting some R+R but somewhere on my body there'll be a couple of tiny slivers of flesh that will have escaped my attention. Usually it's just next to my watch, or just behind the ears or, worst of all, a fold behind the knees which slips through the net and lets the sun's rays set about crisping up for hours and which I don't notice till I attempt to sleep that night. The only way to get any relief when this happens will be to sleep outside on the blacony, where it'll hopefully be cool, and naked as a newborn so that no clothing touches the affected areas. In short, it won't be pretty, it'll be borderline illegal, and I'll be paying a few hundred quid for the privilige.

Before I even get to this dignity-stripping kip though I'll have had to deal with Manchester Airport on an Easter Sunday. At half five in the morning. Whilst this will mean it'll be quieter it also means I'll have had about 45 minutes sleep and be somewhere between hungover and still inebriated from the Easter festivities. Standing in the check-in queue, barely able to stand, focus or blink-in-unison, I'm pretty sure Amy will be thoroughly cheesed off and eyeing me up for how many camels she can sell me for when we get to our destination.

Assuming she decides against it and we make it to the resort on speaking terms (unlikely seeing as the only way I can deal with the boredom of an aircraft involves travel-sickness pills and whiskey) we'll have arrived just in time for lunch where I fully intend to continue on my quest to eat one of every animal on Earth. The target for Tunisia is goat, a local delicacy apparently and usually served in a curry with cous-cous. I assume, this being Africa and all, that the curry will contain enough spice to power Denmark and I'll spend the rest of the first day of the holiday running back and forth to the toilet in-between getting localised sun-burn and sleeping off a day's beer, burning and bowel-evacuation in the au-naturel, al-fresco way detailled above.

With a bit of luck, by day two, I won't have been arrested for public nudity, the sun-burn will have died down and I'll be three stone lighter from the previous day's curry aftermath. This will be good news as I can then get down to the serious business of enjoying myself. Mostly, as with any holiday, this will comprise relaxing, wandering round wherever's local, trying out a variety of regional delicacies and drinks and trying on lots of hats. It'll be fantastic. Whenever I get the business of the airport and the first day's acclimatising out of the way, I am seriously good at holidays.

There is, however, a danger that I may spend all my time lying on the bed in the room doing absolutely nothing. If you've ever been abroad, you'll recognise the danger I'm talking about. It'll have tried to draw you in before. You'll have been struck dumb by it's gaudiness. Mesmerised by it's baffling output. Terrified by it's colours and shapes. If you've ever visited foreign climes you will, at some point, have been transfixed by foreign television.

It. Is. Insane.

Sometimes, as in the Czech Republic, it's made up of indecipherable variety shows and ancient football re-runs and isn't too diverting after a couple of days. On other occasions, as in France, it's got all the gloss and production values of British television but something's not quite right. It might be the fact that the female newscasters are the most beautiful people on Earth or it might be the that in all the drama or comedy nothing ever seems to happen- no matter how mad-cap the premise. I swear I saw a sit-com once over there that was as if Harold Pinter had written 'Ratatouille'.

However, if you're really unlucky, the TV will be like Poland and you'll never want to leave the hotel bedroom ever again. Obviously, in this part of the world, they're sick of their historical national cycle of popping in and out of existence, interpsperced by being invaded by everybody else, and have instead decided to subdue the masses and any potential insurgents with hour after hour of cheap, mental television. There's the indecipherable variety shows of the nearby Czechs except the Poles fill them with transvestites singing bizarre swing/thrash-metal hybrids and circus acts featuring both clowns and eagles. The news that follows is filmed from a broom cupboard, the weathermaps are drawn by a six-year-old and the station idents have clearly been knocked up on a Commodore 64- it is quite simply impossible to look away from. At some point, a hidden camera show will turn up which inevitably features young women having their clothes fall off near unsuspecting commuters/restaurant diners/priests and very little else. The variety of premises under which they can make this happen suggest Benny Hill simply wasn't trying hard enough.

Then, without warning, at about midnight, all normal programming is replaced by hard-core pornography which is about as erotic as sandpaper and so graphic it's more reminiscent of a More4 documentary than onanistic entertainment. Each vignette (actually, they're more 'tone pieces') lasts only 10 minutes so it's still addictive in the way that The Box or MTV Hits- although rather than waiting through whatever's on in the hope that a good tune will be next, you're waiting for some good-old fashioned three-way girl-on-girl-on-girl naked pillow-fighting in a shower. Instead, you'll get something about as sexy as 'Triumph of the Will' featuring a man with back-hair and a woman with the muscle tone of Geoff Capes.

Since Tunisia's an Islamic nation, it's unlikely to feature much programming of the Polish ilk so I might actually get out and about and see some of what is, I'm reliably informed, a beautiful country. They are, however, not big on public nudity so I just have to hope that I can keep the sunburn at bay or no-one spots me taking some nocturnal relief on the balcony. Mind you, whilst I may be arrested for being 'conkers-out' I can at least tell my captors that I wasn't doing it for any sort of sexual thrill. If they've been on holiday to Poland, they'll understand.

The single daftest concept ever thought of by man, outside of daytime TV quiz shows, is the idea of a 'decline in standards'. Anyone who's ever glanced at a copy of the Daily Express (is it me, or are they always there to read- albeit 2 days out of date- in chinese chippies?) will know that we are currently in the middle of one of these periodic but steady plummets into the seventh level of hell on a tidal wave of immigration, binge drinking, psychotic teenagers and foreign football managers. All this is in contrast, in the world of the Express and Daily Mail, to the moral fortitude of just thirty years ago, when the British nation was so bad at getting along with each other we ran out of electricity three days a week, or even the middle of the last century when everyone was polite, everyone helped their neighbours and only a few million people died from either being bombed, shot or gassed for not having blonde hair.

Unfortunately for the modern world's right-wing tabloids, who have to fill the pages between Diana conspiracy theories and waiting for Thatcher to die, the notion of Britian in terminal moral decline is nothing new. For example, read the following statements:

"England is marked by a cruel pestilence, so much injustice, so many illegitimate children- there is so much lechery and adultery"

"They wear parti-coloured tunics with short hoods, belts thickly studded with gold with knives called daggers suspended from pouches beneath them"

Sounds like an episode of Jeremy Kyle, doesn't it? A chav in a gaudily coloured hoodie, laced with bling, paraded in front of the nation for having countless illegitimate spawn whilst he's been inside most of his adult life for knifing someone. You can just see Kyle himself working up into a frenzy of bug-eyed, neck-veined righteousness as he pontificates on how the pathetic chunk in a tracksuit in front of him barely deserves to be allowed to keep breathing. Had he been a little older, Jeremy Kyle- or for that matter Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin Mackenzie or any Middle England firebrand could have penned those lines written above. But how much older would they have to have been? When did the "lechery and adultery" sweep England? When were those "parti-coloured tunics" running amock with their daggers?

Victorian times? 18th century, maybe? Bit earlier than that?

Actually, it was 1344.

Yup, these eerie forerunners of modern Britain are fast approaching their 700th birthday. How on Earth can there be a decline in the morality of the nation when we've not changed in the best part of a millennium? Never better, never worse, always the same, always British. And lest we forget that our 14th century chavs had the bubonic plague to deal with.

The Black Death was, by all accounts, a bit of a bastard. It killed indiscriminately with terrifying haste- essentially you got a cough, your goolies swelled up and then you died, all within 48 hours. And so did all your family. Half the population of Britain died in 18 months and then, 2 years later, what was left was nearly halved again. Most of London became a mass grave, anrachy was rife and everyone became convinced that God had decided humanity was a bit of a balls-up and decided to start again. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, if they'd been invented in the 1300's. Think about what life must have been like back then the next time a right-wing tabloid says we're going to hell in a handcart cause of the Turner Prize.

Staggeringly, The Black Death (and what a name that is, by the way) could have been much, much worse. Sure, the chances were high that you'd end up dead in a pit of corpses with hideously swollen nads but if you survived you came very close to an even worse fate. You nearly became Scottish.

Around the time the plague was scything through the villages of England, Scotland remained rather untouched by the whole thing. This was, after all, shortly after Bannockburn when they'd sent proud Edward homeward to think again and therefore trade and contact between the nations was scarce- stopping the disease-carrying fleas nipping on some prime Scotch beef. The chaps up North did, however, get word that England was on it's knees and decided to make hay while the sun shined and invade. A huge army massed at Selkirk Forest- ready to march south and open up a (Tennent's Special) can of whoop-ass all the way to Westminster.

As the hordes were gathering, the Scots sent a few spies down to Berwick to see what was going on and get some intelligence before the attacks began. Unfortunately, the town was experiencing a full on case of the buboles which the spies promptly contracted. They returned to Selkirk Forest, told the chiefs what was happening down South, coughed a bit, watched their groins go supernova and promptly dropped down dead. Within a week, half the troops had done the same thing and the whole operation was called off- allowing the survivors to head back to their towns and villages taking the plague with them. The Scots inflicted on themselves a crippling defeat of such magnitude it would take 300 years before the English could do just as much damage at Culloden.

So remember, the next time you're lead to believe that all is lost and Britain has essentially turned into Sodom and Gommorah with chlamydia, it has pretty much been for the whole time-span of human civilisation, a whole lot worse. Mind you, the rats that carried the plague did arrive in this country on container ships from Asia via the ports of Europe. So at least the Express could still have blamed immigrants for everything.